Frustrating Moon!

Frustrated by a full moon, I decided to get out early to catch before moonrise at 20.15. Counted 30 but only caught 5 as they were very jumpy. A lot of the birds I saw were in odd places in small groups near to hedges and sheltering out of the wind. It left me wondering if these were migrant flocks unfamiliar with the area. 4 of the 5 were juveniles.

A steady start to the month!!

With the moon not being very helpful at the moment (other than bringing new birds in), catching has been very few and far between! 3 'visits' to my north monts site have produced only 4 catches - 2 Golden Plovers, 1 Fieldfare and 1 Skylark. Ironically the Skylark was a re-trapped bird that I ringed in the same place 5 weeks ago! What's it still doing there??

Roll on the new moon.

Fortune favours the brave!

After my last visit to my ringing site on Sunday when I saw only one woodcock I was sure of only one thing... that I would get wet. However my efforts were rewarded with 14 woodcock seen and 9 ringed..... 8 of these were juveniles.

With a moon and calmer weather forecast from the weekend onwards we should see a lot more woodcock arriving soon.

October! Who'd of thought?

Generally when you think of going dazzling on the hills, you think about starting mid to late November (usually when the majority of wintering Woodcock are in). But this year myself and Tony decided to give October a try, mainly targeting Golden Plover as not many of these get ringed in Britain!! It started off very slowly, just getting the odd Pipit or Skylark on each 'session', but by the time the full moon was here, birds were dropping in, even Woodcock!! With the moon disappearing for the last week and a half we put in a big effort to try and be out every night mainly concentrating on 2 known 'stop-off sites' for the Plovers as they will not hang around up there for long! Our efforts payed off!

Catches were as follows:



Hopefully now with a good number of Golden Plovers ringed, as they start to head to the coast for winter, the odd bird will get recovered and help us understand more about who goes where, and maybe why??

Lapwings join the 'party'....

I caught my first two Lapwings of the winter at my Woodcock site near Llanerfyl this evening. They didn't hang around for very long on the hills last winter (presumably due to the weather), so it would be nice to have a few more goes at them before they disappear again!



A Snipe was also caught.

The past week has seen a steady increase in migrant woodcock arriving in West Wales. Apart from the single bird reported previously on this blog and one that I ringed on my site near Aberystwyth on Oct 19th it has remained quiet until the night of the 26th when I saw 10 and ringed 6.

Of the 21 ringed by our Woodcock Network members so far this autumn the vast majority have been juvenile, this repeats a trend noticed over previous autumns.

It has often been stated that woodcock migrate on a full moon, the 31 that arrived on North Ronaldsay on the night of Oct 25th say not!

A rich seam indeed!!

We are having continued success dazzling Golden Plovers on the hills around Ceri Forest. Last night myself and Shropshire ringer,  Paul Ashworth, ringed 10 more along with a Lapwing and a Fieldfare. On a couple of nights earlier in the week Paul Leafe and I caught a total of 26 Golden Plover, 14 Fieldfares, 2 Snipe, 1 Woodcock and a Stock Dove! That's over 50 Golden Plovers in October alone - madness!! Seriously contemplating a colour-ringing scheme now!

Adult Golden Plover wing, note old (paler) secondaries mixed with new

Adult GP tertials with "horse-shoe" of gold edged

Juvenile Golden Plover - all secondaries even age and just two pale spots on tips of tertials

Ton-up and a juicy bonus!!!

Last night visiting Shropshire ringer, Alan Heath, Jane and myself headed down to Ynyslas to do a spot more drag-netting for Skylarks. Alan was keen to see the technique in action as the Shropshire Ringing Group are contemplating getting a net themselves and hitting the multitude of stubbles in the north of the county.

Drag-net in operation (hard to show in the dark mind!)

Numbers present are dropping a bit now, I guess birds are still pushing south, but we did manage to catch another 17 including 3 re-traps (two had gained weight and one had lost a bit).

A couple of the Skylarks caught appeared to have orange patches around their eyes and on closer inspection this appeared to be some sort of mite infestation? Not seen this before.

Not satisfied with our efforts at Ynyslas we headed over to Llanon. After a quick look along the foreshore north of the church, where we ringed a Golden Plover and a Black-headed Gull, we headed to the fields south of the town where we caught another 10 Skylarks (including 1 re-trap). This took the number caught in Ceredigion so far this autumn to over 100. We also had a very special early Christmas bonus from Lapland!!

This, as far as I know, is a ringing first for Ceredigion. Not many Lapland Buntings are caught in Britain, although 2010 was a very good year with 85 ringed throughout Britain and Ireland. To show just how unusual a year it was, only 20 were ringed in the previous 10 years! Certainly bought a smile to three people's faces and even elicited a bit of spontaneous "Lap" dancing (no hyphen!).

Recoveries round-up

A selection of the more interesting recoveries from the latest batch supplied by BTO.

Some of these are viewable as maps on the BTO online reports webpages

http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/ringing/publications/online-ringing-reports

RF54434  DIPPER Pullus 4/4   26^th April 2010 Craswall, Herefordshire. (S. J. Tyler)

R  5F 21^st April 2011 Knighton, Powys.  38 km, 360 days.

DB33825  SANDWICH TERN Pullus  23^rd June 1999 Lady’s Island Lake, Wexford (O. Mearne)

R  4  4^th August 2011 Ynyslas, Borth, Dyfed.  161 km,  4,425 days

POL D38540  DUNLIN  4  5^th April 2008  Salinas do Samouco, Setubal, PORTUGAL

R 17^th July 2010 Ynyslas, Borth, Dyfed.  1,579 kms, 833days

L321020  SEDGE WARBLER  3J  15^th August 2010 Dyfi-Aber Leri NNR, Borth

R 28^th August 2010  Sandouville, Seine-Maritime, FRANCE  452 km, 13 days

Y104547  SAND MARTIN  3J  12^th July 2011  River Wye, Glasbury, Powys

R 9^th August 2011 Le Massereau, Frossay, Loire-Atlantique, FRANCE  542 km, 28 days

Y104648  SAND MARTIN  3J  24^th July 2011  River Wye, Glasbury, Powys

R 30^th August 2011  Abbotsbury Swannery, Dorset.  160 kms, 37 days

Talk of the Devil!

I must be psychic! In the last post I referred to foreign-ringed Golden Plovers being few and far between. Amazingly I just nipped out for a quick lamp around the fields at Bwlch-y-Sarnau tonight and caught another, this time with a Belgian ring on!

Oddly it was on its own in a field where I often catch the odd woodcock but don't usually see any goldies, very nearly missed it too!  There have only been 3 previous records of Belgian-ringed Golden Plovers in Britain and Ireland and only 168 foreign-ringed GP's reported ever so as I said before, pretty rewarding.  Will post a map of the movement when I get the ringing details back. Also caught a woodcock and two fieldfares.